Introduction

Beamer is a LaTeX document class for presentations. rst2beamer [1]
provides a Docutils [2] writer that transforms restructured text
[3] into Beamer-flavoured LaTeX. and provides a commandline script for the
same. Via this script, ReST can therefore be used to prepare slides and
presentations.

Installation

$ pip install --upgrade rst2beamer3k

Usage

rst2beamer should interpret a reasonable subset of restructured text and
produce reasonable LaTeX. Not all features of beamer have been implemented,
just a (large) subset that allows the quick production of good looking slides.
These include:

Overlay lists (i.e. list items that appear point-by-point)

Beamer themes

Automatic centering and resizing of figures

Embedded notes and the output of note slides.

Arranging slide contents into columns.

Some examples can be found in the docs/examples directory of the
distribution. In practice, rst2beamer can be used with pdflatex to get PDF
versions of a presentation.

rst2beamer is called:

$ rst2beamer [options] [<source> [<destination>]]

For example:

$ rst2beamer infile.txt outfile.tex

where infile.txt contains the ReST and outfile.tex contains the
produced Beamer LaTeX.

It supports the usual docutils and LaTeX writer (rst2latex) options, save the
documentclass option (which is fixed to beamer) and hyperref options
(which are already set in beamer). It also supports:

--theme=THEME Specify Beamer theme.
--overlaybullets=OVERLAYBULLETS
Overlay bulleted items. Put [<+-| alert@+>] at the
end of \begin{itemize} so that Beamer creats an
overlay for each bulleted item and the presentation
reveals one bullet at a time
--centerfigs=CENTERFIGS
Center figures. All includegraphics statements will
be put inside center environments.
--documentoptions=DOCUMENTOPTIONS
Specify document options. Multiple options can be
given, separated by commas. Default is
"10pt,a4paper".
--shownotes=SHOWNOTES Print embedded notes along with the slides. Possible
arguments include 'false' (don't show), 'only' (show
only notes), 'left', 'right', 'top', 'bottom' (show
in relation to the annotated slide).

Limitations

Earlier versions of rst2beamer did not work with docutils 0.4, seemingly due
to changes in the LaTeX writer. While this has been fixed, most work has been
done with docutils snapshots from version 0.5 and up. In balance, users are
recommended to update docutils.

More recently, changes in the LaTeX writer in docutils 0.6 broke rst2beamer
again. We think all those bugs have been caught.

Not all features of beamer are supported, and some - that deal with with page
layout or presentation - may never be. Introducing complex syntax to achieve
complex and specific page effects defeats the point of ReST’s simple and
easy-to-write format. If you need a complex presentation, use Powerpoint or
Keynote.

If the content for an individual slide is too large, it will simply overflow
the edges of the slide and disappear. Arguably, this is a sign you should put
less on each slide.

Credits

rst2beamer is developed by Ryan Krauss and
Paul-Michael Agapow. Thanks to those who reported and
helped us track down bugs: Perttu Laurinen, Mike Pennington, James Haggerty
and Dale Hathaway.